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HTML Element Grouping

1. Group related content - <div> - Use a describing class design pattern as if you were commenting to the user the current section of the page they are viewing.
2. Once you're finished doing this, you more than likely will have to use absolute positioning for certain portions of your document. With most designs you won't have to worry about positioning the footer/article/related sections. No extra markup will be needed to float these compound elements.
3. Absolute position embedded portions to achieve 'presentational free' markup.
4. Look at the example I provided that contains the navigation's of the page. You could have the primary navigation at the top of your page while the tertiary navigation is placed at the bottom of your page.

My point being is that you don't have to look at developing mock-ups with the top-bottom/left-right approach.

I just think this is common sense so I guess the meaning of the post is more subtle.

Yeah if only authors would put this into practice though

I mean you can have every navigation on a page in one container(<div class="navigation">)... Even if you happened to have 30 different embedded navigations (most likely not)... Each could live on different sections of the page....

I can't wrap my head around why authors still look at marking up pages from top to bottom/left to right...

However, I don't agree with placing all the navigation in one place. many times the navigation belongs to a specific section. In that case I believe that navigation for that section should go inside the section not outside it.

However, I don't agree with placing all the navigation in one place. many times the navigation belongs to a specific section. In that case I believe that navigation for that section should go inside the section not outside it.

Common sense for authors that know this

Beginners or authors that are migrating away from table layouts don't know this...

I would think 80% of the authors out there don't know this from looking at their sites

You have a good argument about placing navigations in one place. To make this simplified you could place all 'major' page navigations relating to the document and not a specific section in the navigation section and other sections that have 'sub' nav's would of course belong to the specific section.

We also came to an understanding in another thread that global navigation should be in the footer after the content for accessibility reasons (After much debate between the usefulness of it) and therefore it requires some positioning to replace the navigation say for a header for it to follow conventions.

We also came to an understanding in another thread that global navigation should be in the footer after the content for accessibility reasons (After much debate between the usefulness of it) and therefore it requires some positioning to replace the navigation say for a header for it to follow conventions.

Yep, how I set it up in my code sample at the top

Now thinking about it maybe the other navigation's embedded inside the compound(div class="navigation"): secondary, tertiary could be more specific to a section, thus not embedding these inside the navigation division is a better bet